Swift, Apple's hot new programming language, is now open source. It is available (or will be once the web site isn't so overwhelmed!) for Mac and Linux under an Apache 2.0 license.
"Swift is now open source! We are excited by this new chapter in the story of Swift. After Apple unveiled the Swift programming language, it quickly became one of the fastest growing languages in history. Swift makes it easy to write software that is incredibly fast and safe by design. Now that Swift is open source, you can help make the best general purpose programming language available everywhere. "
Apple's Swift programming language may eventually replace the respected but arcane Objective C as the native language for OS X and iOS development, but if you don't have a Mac you might be forgiven for not having taken an interest so far.
However, as MacRumors now reports, Apple have now delivered on their promise to open-source Swift and release a Linux port. It doesn't sound as if the Linux port is quite ready for production use just yet, but the source is out there. Does this mean that Swift is now a contender for general purpose programming?
(Note: at the time of writing, the servers at Swift.org are failing to live up to their name.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by choose another one on Saturday December 05 2015, @09:04PM
rms (it's lower case btw, always has been) himself spent many years working on free software to run on proprietary OSs, I think he would be surprised to hear that it was pointless or that the users of the software didn't have freedom as a result.